The North American power grid was once called the “ . . . supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century.” Unfortunately, the power grid is quickly aging such that outages and inefficiencies result in great costs to end users.
A growing movement to provide clean energy, utilizing such sources as wind, currently suffers from significant inefficiencies due to limitations within the power grid. Commercial wind farms often produce much greater energy than is realized, but the transmissions lines cannot accommodate the amount of energy produced, thereby resulting in large amounts of wasted effort.
Residential applications are often seen as impractical due to costs, lack of providing enough energy during peak demand, and wasted energy during off-peak times. In addition, there is no application that provides two-way communication between end users and the distribution source.
Current efforts to develop a Smart Grid are ongoing, but these efforts are generally limited to increasing reliability, efficiency, and safety of the power grid, largely in an effort to reduce threats of tenor attacks, resulting in large scale power outages. Unfortunately, there is no system that currently provides the end user the ability to utilize and manage distributed energy sources. Further, there is no system that currently provides the capability of the distributed energy sources, such as in residential applications, to return unused energy to the power grid, or store excess energy for later use by the end-user. Still further, there is no system that provides the end user, or other interested party, such as a stakeholder, the ability to collect usage and generation data, to deliver electricity more efficiently and detect problems within the system, and provide information that allows for strategic placement of distributed generation sources for overall performance improvement.